She is a gifted artist who has traveled all over the world, painting beauty as she saw it, an easel dug into the sand on a beach someplace or perched at the top of a hill overlooking a quaint Italian village. She is a singer, a guitarist, a devoted mother and wife, a meticulous dresser with a penchant for wearing berets. She is up in years now, but you wouldn’t guess it when you watch her bebop around the church, a smile always on her face. Enthusiasm seems to come easy for her, and it is contagious–her encouragement and her effortless laugh brighten the spaces she inhabits. She isn’t loud, but she is always there, and her expression says that she is pleased to show up, delighted to be a part of it all, this life and this church and this weary world.

I sat with her earlier this week and learned a stunning fact. This dear woman with so much life in her has been teaching preschoolers in our church for 56 years. Let that sink in. She started wrangling preschoolers in what we call “the basement” of our church in 1962. And today, on any given Sunday, if you descend the steps to that bright and cheery spot where preschoolers wriggle and giggle and get their first taste of who God is and what He does, you will find her there, singing and crafting and loving someone else’s babies just because the Lord has given her a great gift for it.

I can’t think of a better example of one who refuses to grow weary in doing good.

When rewards are handed out in Heaven, I wonder if, alongside the great preachers and evangelists, alongside the martyrs and the missionaries, there won’t be a whole congregation of women who spent a lifetime pouring God’s love into little spirits and hearts and minds. Women who determined that, while they could do many things for the Lord, they would not neglect the care and keeping and spiritual formation of those little babies who need to know just how much Jesus Christ adores them. Women who didn’t give up. Women who determined that even when they were weary, they would not, could not stop doing good for the kingdom of the Most High God. Even in the basement. Even for 56 years.

If you are one of those women, God sees you. What you are doing matters.

Do not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time you will reap the harvest if you do not give up. Galatians 6:9

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She was nervous. It was first-day-back jitters–the kind where you wonder if your friend circle has shifted over the summer without your knowledge. When you’re not entirely sure how things are going to be when you walk through the school doors. I remember that feeling so well. Eighth grade is not a place I would ever want to be again. I hugged her tight in our cozy kitchen.

When I was younger I used to wonder what I would say to my children as we parted ways for the day. Back then, when they were all in our little nest, underfoot all day long, my buddies, it was hard to imagine what it would be like to send them out into the world. And then the world changed. How could I have possibly dreamed up THIS world, this place where my 13 year old, even with no access to social media or the internet, deals daily with kids her own age who are questioning their sexuality, who are suicidal or self-harming, who are already beginning to struggle with addictions, who have no frame of reference for who Jesus is or how things could be different? This, in small town America. The world has certainly shifted right underneath our feet.

All of those little phrases I used to imagine saying to my kids as they skipped off to school just don’t seem sufficient in the spiritual and moral turmoil of our day. In the lostness. In the wandering. So, this morning when my first-born stepped out of the car for her last first day of junior high school, I looked into her beautiful, clear blue eyes and said with a little smile, “Just honor God.”

It’s the most we can ask of each other.

It’s what we must ask of our believing children. And it’s what they should be able to see in us. These are days for courageous obedience. For fierce faithfulness. For total surrender.

“Just honor God,” I told her, and she nodded, turned, and disappeared into the crowded hallways of her mission field.

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About Melissa

My husband Chad and I have been married for 19 years, and we have had all kinds of adventures, from our days in Music City with his rock band, to teaching junior high school in classrooms right next door to each other, to law school and the attorney life, to incredible years watching God work in churches where we have served…